Between Brussels and Silicon Valley: Is the EU's big tech crackdown running out of road?

The European Union set out to do something that even the United States had failed to pull off at scale: write new rules for the internet… and then actually enforce them. The Digital Markets Act, which came into force in 2022 and began biting in earnest a year later, was meant to prise open the walled gardens of platforms such as Apple, Google, Meta, Amazon, and Microsoft – forcing interoperability, limiting self-preferencing, and giving businesses a fighting chance against the gatekeepers that controlled access to billions of consumers. The ambition was real. So, increasingly, are the complications.

Over the past 18 months, the Commission has issued fines totalling €700 million against Apple and Meta, with the first removal of a core platform service from a designation decision and the adoption of binding specification decisions marking a shift from institutional setup into tangible enforcement outcomes. Yet for every headline fine, there is a countervailing pressure, both from Washington and from an industry that shows no sign of quietly accepting the new order.

The view from the other side of the Atlantic is rather different. The Trump administration has increasingly clashed with the EU over fines and investigations of American tech companies, with Google, Apple and Meta contesting charges totalling more than six billion euros since the start of 2024. Washington has accused Brussels of using regulation as a form of protectionism, threatening a Section 301 trade investigation that could lead to retaliatory tariffs, a move that has visibly influenced the Commission’s tactical calculations.

The enforcement gap

The enforcement picture is more complicated than the headline numbers suggest. The year 2025 began with reports that the European Commission was reassessing antitrust investigations under the DMA against Apple, Meta and Google, raising concerns that the probes would be scaled back. Many speculated that the fines issued, €500 million for Apple and €200 million for Meta, were deliberately kept low to avoid escalating tensions with the Trump White House.

There is also a resource problem that rarely makes the front pages. Olivier Guersent, head of the European Commission’s competition department, raised a stark warning that severe understaffing is forcing the department into impossible trade-offs. With only 19 staff instead of the 80 planned for DMA supervision, a staggering 76 per cent shortfall that the Commission says cannot adequately oversee either new DMA priorities or traditional antitrust cases.

That gap matters enormously for anyone building or operating infrastructure in Europe. Cloud computing has been pulled firmly into the regulatory orbit: cloud computing is designated as a core platform service under the Digital Markets Act, and the European Commission has opened market investigations to assess whether Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure should be formally designated as gatekeepers. For hyperscalers, co-location operators, and their enterprise customers, the question is no longer whether regulation is coming but how consistently it will be applied.

Big Tech’s response has been to fight on multiple fronts simultaneously. Apple has demanded that Brussels scrap the DMA altogether, while Meta has said the Commission tries to “handicap successful American business while allowing Chinese and European companies to operate under different standards.” Google, for its part, has argued that EU investigations into its AI models “risk stifling innovation in a market that is more competitive than ever.”

Digital sovereignty vs. reality

The regulatory debate in Brussels cannot be separated from a broader question of infrastructure strategy. Mark Boost, CEO of Civo, has warned that hyperscale concentration is eroding Europe’s control over its own digital future, arguing that “sovereignty means having control when incidents like this happen, but too much of ours is currently outsourced to foreign cloud providers.” The sentiment, following a major AWS outage in late 2025, captured a frustration that many European operators share privately even if they are reluctant to articulate it publicly.

The Commission has attempted to channel that frustration into positive industrial policy. The European Commission has launched plans to build four AI gigafactories, with €20 billion in funding announced, an effort to demonstrate that Europe can build sovereign capability rather than simply regulate its way to competitiveness.

Tom Henriksson, general partner at OpenOcean, welcomed the shift in tone. “It’s an increasingly rare thing to see a piece of tech regulation amended to include a specific, positive goal of facilitating the growth of AI and quantum,” he said, “but that’s exactly what the EuroHPC JU regulation will do.” He added that the change signalled “a broader policy reset”, one that acknowledges Europe cannot win a regulatory argument it is also losing on the investment scorecard.

That tension between rule-making and market-building is the defining fault line in the current debate. Critics warn that concessions made to pacify Big Tech come at a cost, with citizens’ fundamental rights potentially weakened as the EU balances competitiveness against protection, and the Commission risking undermining the privacy and safeguards that once set Europe apart on the global stage.

Meanwhile, throughout 2025, businesses accelerated their technology initiatives as countries looked to bring in regulations like the EU AI Act and adopt digital sovereignty measures — with competition among hyperscalers in Europe ramping up infrastructure in response to customer demand and stricter regulatory expectations. The investment is flowing regardless of the regulatory uncertainty, which tells its own story about where the real leverage lies.

The transatlantic fault line

What makes this moment particularly consequential is that the EU’s regulatory experiment is no longer operating in a vacuum. The DMA was always conceived with one eye on its potential to set global norms. The so-called Brussels Effect, by which European regulation shapes corporate behaviour worldwide because multinationals find it easier to apply one standard globally than to maintain separate practices for different markets.

That effect is now explicitly under threat. The Trump administration announced it would “take a similar approach to other countries that pursue an EU-style strategy in this area,” in an attempt to dissuade the Brussels Effect from driving other jurisdictions to consider digital rules modelled on the DMA and DSA. For regulators in London, Singapore, or Canberra who have been watching Brussels closely, that is a pointed warning.

The Commission’s first statutory review of the DMA, published in April 2026, declared the legislation “fit for purpose,” pointing to greater browser choice, easier data portability, and new interoperability features as evidence of tangible gains. Teresa Ribera, the Commission’s executive vice-president for competition, was vehement that the DMA is opening up gatekeeper ecosystems while remaining future-proof for challenges in cloud computing and artificial intelligence. The tech industry’s response was immediate and blunt: the Computer and Communications Industry Association Europe described the evaluation as “unbalanced,” arguing it failed to properly analyse unintended negative consequences, including hampered major product launches.

That disagreement is not merely academic. Regulatory unpredictability is itself a cost. Whether the DMA ultimately succeeds in reshaping the competitive landscape for cloud and platform services, or becomes a cautionary tale about the limits of ex-ante regulation, will have direct consequences for where infrastructure investment flows over the next decade.

The honest answer, for now, is that nobody knows. The Commission has the tools but, arguably, not yet the staffing to use them consistently. The political will exists, but it is being tested by the most powerful administration in Washington in a generation. And the industry being regulated has the resources to contest every decision through every available legal channel for years. What is clear is that the rules are changing – in a direction that will not be reversed.

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